I believe that High school had the greatest effect on shaping who I am both academically and my personality. So many things influenced me during this period of my life including my friends, teachers, and coaches. Looking back it is difficult to imagine the person I would be if I did not make some of the choices I made in high school.
During my freshman year I still had the academic mentality that I still had all my life. Throughout all of middle school I would pay attention in class and do my work but not truly apply myself in any subject. The only times I can imagine myself as a deep learner during middle school and freshman year of high school would be during the days that the subject we were learning in science really interested me. But during those years of my life I didn’t need to apply myself or attempt to be a deep learner, I sat through my freshman year earth science not giving any effort besides listening and managed to score a 98 on the final. These average level classes that I just listened in like English and Math I still managed to pull low B or B-‘s. All my friends that I had throughout middle school and freshman year all shared the same academic traits. Being in the mid-level classes it was easy for us to pull decent grades and not apply ourselves.
In the winter of freshman year I did something that unknowingly at the time would shape me academically, and that was to join the Southington High school Men’s swim team. My parents were the ones who pushed to join a high school sport since I didn’t want to take karate anymore which I have been doing for the past 8 years of my life. It was there that I met a whole new different group of friends that would be my best friends throughout the rest of high school and still are today.
The reason why they had such a great academic influence on me was because I realized that like me they were good students and some had science career interests such as me, but they had excellent grades in higher level and honors classes. This really sank in sophomore year when I realized that they were mostly taking classes that I would be taking next year and the freshman on the team were in math level classes that I was in as a sophomore. This realization that I was actually average and not as intelligent as them in my eyes it pushed me to join other higher level classes and college level AP classes that they were all considering to take.
Junior year I took an AP Bio class and took higher-level classes that I had a good enough GPA to enroll in. That year really hit me hard as I slowly began to realize with poor grades that I need to really put in effort in all of my classes and do a lot of extra work outside of school to even hold a B. AP Bio especially shocked me with the first day being a syllabus overview and a realization that the amount of material I had previously covered in a moth would be crammed into one week. The accumulation of all of these classes, athletics, and the looming college application process really made me struggle with all of my classes throughout the whole year. Meanwhile my honors friends who were accustomed to the rigorous academic curriculum were also stressed but not in shock and insanely stressed as I was. I realized that they were already conditioned for this and were definitely much smarter than me.
The even bigger shock yet to come was that all my friends’ class ranks were far above mine due to the class weights of the higher level classes that I missed out in freshman and sophomore year. Seeing how I was actually still an “average” student I frantically struggled through senior year taking two more AP sciences and other higher level classes such as physics and other honors classes. This rigor really prepared me for college because I was now used to college level work and managed to fly through my first semester with the best GPA I have ever had in my life.
I know that my friends have changed my whole academic attitude and helped me grow and develop as a better human being than I previously was. The First semester of college I lived in a learning community with all science majors and, as I quickly learned through study groups before exams, that most of them were lost and failing their basic biology and chemistry classes. They were shock by how much more work college was than high school. This kind of work was not paper and busy work, but studying and retaining information which many of my peers told me they didn’t know how to do because they never have before. They like me had good grades in high school but never took any classes to challenge themselves, the result was an inability to quickly handle the shockingly new amount of work load. I see that this could have easily been me if I lazily passed my average level classes in high school and not have made an effort to do what I told them to do which was to “learn how to learn”. I helped as many people as I can with study habits and saw many of them improve in their grades because they knew how to take down information from lectures and repeat it until they learned it.
During my freshman year I still had the academic mentality that I still had all my life. Throughout all of middle school I would pay attention in class and do my work but not truly apply myself in any subject. The only times I can imagine myself as a deep learner during middle school and freshman year of high school would be during the days that the subject we were learning in science really interested me. But during those years of my life I didn’t need to apply myself or attempt to be a deep learner, I sat through my freshman year earth science not giving any effort besides listening and managed to score a 98 on the final. These average level classes that I just listened in like English and Math I still managed to pull low B or B-‘s. All my friends that I had throughout middle school and freshman year all shared the same academic traits. Being in the mid-level classes it was easy for us to pull decent grades and not apply ourselves.
In the winter of freshman year I did something that unknowingly at the time would shape me academically, and that was to join the Southington High school Men’s swim team. My parents were the ones who pushed to join a high school sport since I didn’t want to take karate anymore which I have been doing for the past 8 years of my life. It was there that I met a whole new different group of friends that would be my best friends throughout the rest of high school and still are today.
The reason why they had such a great academic influence on me was because I realized that like me they were good students and some had science career interests such as me, but they had excellent grades in higher level and honors classes. This really sank in sophomore year when I realized that they were mostly taking classes that I would be taking next year and the freshman on the team were in math level classes that I was in as a sophomore. This realization that I was actually average and not as intelligent as them in my eyes it pushed me to join other higher level classes and college level AP classes that they were all considering to take.
Junior year I took an AP Bio class and took higher-level classes that I had a good enough GPA to enroll in. That year really hit me hard as I slowly began to realize with poor grades that I need to really put in effort in all of my classes and do a lot of extra work outside of school to even hold a B. AP Bio especially shocked me with the first day being a syllabus overview and a realization that the amount of material I had previously covered in a moth would be crammed into one week. The accumulation of all of these classes, athletics, and the looming college application process really made me struggle with all of my classes throughout the whole year. Meanwhile my honors friends who were accustomed to the rigorous academic curriculum were also stressed but not in shock and insanely stressed as I was. I realized that they were already conditioned for this and were definitely much smarter than me.
The even bigger shock yet to come was that all my friends’ class ranks were far above mine due to the class weights of the higher level classes that I missed out in freshman and sophomore year. Seeing how I was actually still an “average” student I frantically struggled through senior year taking two more AP sciences and other higher level classes such as physics and other honors classes. This rigor really prepared me for college because I was now used to college level work and managed to fly through my first semester with the best GPA I have ever had in my life.
I know that my friends have changed my whole academic attitude and helped me grow and develop as a better human being than I previously was. The First semester of college I lived in a learning community with all science majors and, as I quickly learned through study groups before exams, that most of them were lost and failing their basic biology and chemistry classes. They were shock by how much more work college was than high school. This kind of work was not paper and busy work, but studying and retaining information which many of my peers told me they didn’t know how to do because they never have before. They like me had good grades in high school but never took any classes to challenge themselves, the result was an inability to quickly handle the shockingly new amount of work load. I see that this could have easily been me if I lazily passed my average level classes in high school and not have made an effort to do what I told them to do which was to “learn how to learn”. I helped as many people as I can with study habits and saw many of them improve in their grades because they knew how to take down information from lectures and repeat it until they learned it.